Charles Snow - The New Men

Was that enough reason for my distress?

Carefully Martin packed the photographic plate in the box, made a note on the outside, and turned to me. He apologized again for keeping me waiting; he was expecting a result from another laboratory in ten minutes, and then he would be ready to go.

We made some conversation with our thoughts elsewhere. Then, without a preliminary and also without awkwardness, he said: ‘I’m sorry we had to brush Hanna off.’

I said yes.

‘I’m sure it was wise,’ said Martin.

‘Is there any end to this business?’

‘Not yet.’

He went on: ‘Hanna will understand. She’s a match for most of us.’ I glanced at him, his face lit from below by the shining screen. He was wearing a reflective, sarcastic smile. He said: ‘Why don’t you and I marry women like that?’

I caught his tone. My own marriage had been even more untranquil than his.

‘Because we wanted a quiet life,’ I said. It was the kind of irony that we could still share.

‘Exactly,’ said Martin.

We seemed close enough to speak. It was for me to take the first step if we were to be reconciled. I said: ‘We look like being in an unpleasant situation soon.’

Martin said: ‘Which one?’

I said: ‘About Sawbridge.’

‘Maybe,’ said Martin.

‘It would be a help to me if I knew what you were thinking.’

‘How, quite?’

‘These are times when one needs some help. So far as I’m concerned I need it very much.’

After a pause, Martin said: ‘The trouble is, we’re not likely to agree.’

Without roughness, he turned the appeal away. He began asking questions about the new flat into which I was just arranging to move.

The spring came, and Sawbridge remained at liberty. But the scientist about whom the warning came through on New Year’s Eve had been arrested, had come up at the Old Bailey, pleaded guilty and been given ten years. His name, which Bevill had forgotten that day, made headlines in the newspapers.

Later, I realized that most of us on the inside hid from ourselves how loud the public clamour was. We knew that people were talking nonsense, were exaggerating out of all meaning the practical results; and so, just like other officials in the inside of a scandal, we shut our ears off from any remark we heard about it, in the train, at the club bar, in the theatre-foyer, as though we were deaf men who had conveniently switched off our hearing aid.

Myself; I went into court for the trial. Little was said there; for many people it was enough, as it had been for Bevill, to add to the gritty taste of fear.

Always quick off the mark, Hankins, in his profession the most businesslike of men, got in with the first article, which he called The Final Treason. It was a moving and eloquent piece, the voice of those who felt left over from their liberal youth, to whom the sweetness of life had ceased with the twenties, and now seemed to themselves to be existing in no-man’s-land. For me, it had a feature of special interest. That was a single line in which he wrote, like many writers before him, a private message. He was signalling to Irene reminding her that she had not always lived among ‘the new foreigners’ — that is, the English scientists. For Hankins had come to think of them as a different race.

Soon after came news, drifting up from Barford to the committees, that Luke was ill. ‘Poorly’ was the first description I heard. No one seemed to know what the matter was — though some guessed it might be an after effect of his ‘dose’ It did not sound serious; it did not immediately strike me that this put Martin in effective charge.

I thought so little of it that I did not write to inquire, until towards the end of March I was told by Francis Getliffe that Luke was on the ‘certain’ list for that year’s elections to the Royal Society. I asked if I could congratulate him. Yes, said Francis, if it were kept between us. Luke himself already knew. So I sent a note, but for some days received no reply. At last a letter came, but it was written by Nora Luke. She said that Walter was not well, and not up to writing his thanks himself; if I could spare the time to come down some day, he would like to talk to me. If I did this, wrote Nora in a strong inflexible handwriting, she asked me to be sure to see her first. Then she could give me ‘all the information’.

I went to Barford next morning, and found Nora in her laboratory office. On the door was a card on which the Indian ink gleamed jet bright: N Luke, and underneath PSO, for Nora had, not long before, been promoted and was at that time the only woman at Barford of her rank.

As soon as I saw her, I said: ‘This is serious, isn’t it?’

‘It may be,’ said Nora Luke.

She added: ‘He asked me to tell you. He knows what the doctors think.’

‘What do they think?’

Sitting at her desk, with her hair in a bun, wearing rimless spectacles, her fawn sweater, her notebook in front of her, she looked as she must have done when she was a student, and she and Luke first met. Steadily she answered: ‘The worst possibility is cancer of the bone.’

It was what he had feared, in his first attack.

‘That may not happen,’ Nora went on in a reasonable tone. ‘It seems to depend on whether this flare-up is caused by the gamma rays or whether it’s traces of plutonium that have stayed inside him and gone for the bone.’

‘When will you know?’

‘No one can give him any idea. They haven’t any experience to go on. If this bout passes off, he won’t have any guarantee that it’s not going to return.’

I muttered something: then I inquired how many people knew.

‘Most people here, I suppose,’ said Nora. Suddenly she was curious: ‘Why do you ask that?’

In my middle twenties, I also had been threatened with grave illness. I had tried to conceal it, because it might do me professional harm. Instead of telling Nora that, I just said how often I had seen people hide even the mention of cancer.

‘He wouldn’t have any patience with that,’ said Nora. ‘Nor should I. Even if the worst came to the worst’ — she stared straight at me ‘the sooner everyone here knows the dangers the more they can save themselves.’

How open she was, just as Luke was himself! Sometimes their openness made the ruses, the secretiveness, of such as I seem shabby. Yet even so, learning from Nora about her husband’s illness, I felt that she was too open, I was more embarrassed than if she could not get a word out, and so I was less use to her.

I asked where Luke was, and who was nursing him. In the establishment hospital as before, said Nora; Mrs Drawbell, also as before.

‘She’s better at it than I am,’ said Nora.

She added, her light eyes right in the middle of her lenses, her glance not leaving mine: ‘If he’s knocked out for years, I suppose I shall have some practice.’ She went on: ‘As a matter of fact, if I’ve got him lying on his back for keeps. I shall be grateful, as long as I’ve got him at all.’

She said it without a tear. She said it without varying her flat, sensible, methodical voice. Nevertheless, it made me realize how, even five minutes before, and always in the past, I had grossly misunderstood her. The last time Luke was ill, and she had left the ward, I had thought to myself that she was glad to escape, that like me she could not stand the sight of suffering. Nonsense: it was a carelessness I should not have committed about a wilder woman such as Irene; at forty I had fallen into the adolescent error of being deceived by the prosaic.

Actually Nora would have stayed chained to her husband’s bedside, had it kept the breath of life in him a second longer. She had the total devotion — which did not need to be passionate, or even emotional — of one who began with no confidence in her charms, who scarcely dared think of her charms at all. Her self-esteem she invested in her mind which in fact she thought, quite mistakenly, was in her husband’s class. But, in her heart, she was always incredulous that she had found a man for life. Rather than have him taken away she would accept any terms.